Lawyers' conduct rules and GEO: state the facts, ask about the claims

Why is a fact the part of a page an answer can repeat?

Because a fact keeps its meaning when it is lifted out of the page, which is the property citability names. When an AI assistant's answer mentions a firm, it may give the firm a sentence or two, and the person reading it sees nothing of the page around them. "[Attorney] was admitted in [jurisdiction] in [year]" says the same thing in an answer as on the attorney's page. So does "the first consultation is free and lasts [length]".

A claim travels less well. "Our record in [county] court speaks for itself" means something only with the page around it: which cases, what counted as a win, the disclaimer three paragraphs down. An answer that repeats the sentence need carry none of that, whether the sentence came from a page fetched that day or from training data. Whatever qualified the claim stays behind on the page, and the sentence reaches a stranger on its own.

Facts are also what people ask for. A person looking for a lawyer names a county, a matter, a language, whether the first meeting is free; the overview for law firms sets out those questions. Each part of such a question has a fact on the firm's pages that answers it. "Results-driven advocacy" answers none of them.

This page is not legal advice, and it does not say what any jurisdiction's rules allow or forbid. It separates the facts a firm holds about itself from the statements that need an answer from the bar, the law society or ethics counsel first, and it marks the places where one kind turns into the other.

Seven facts, and the form that keeps each one a fact

The facts below are the ones a caller's question turns on. Each is written so that the sentence carrying it can stand alone and read the same wherever the firm publishes it, and each changes on the page the day it changes at the firm. What a page per practice area should hold around them is set out in practice-area pages for a law firm; this page is about the facts themselves. The template covers one attorney and one office, and a firm repeats it for each.

[Attorney name]
Admitted:        [jurisdiction], [year]; [jurisdiction], [year]
Courts:          [court, as the court names itself]; [court]
Practice areas:  [plain name]; [plain name]
Languages:       [language]; consultations held in it: [yes | no]

[Firm name], [office address]
Phone answered:  [days], [hours]
Consultations:   by appointment: [yes | no]; [in person | phone | video]
First meeting:   [free | fee of [amount]], [length]
Fee basis:       [matter]: [hourly | flat fee | contingency | retainer]; covers [what]
Checked against the attorneys' records on: [YYYY-MM-DD]

• Admissions, by jurisdiction and year, in the admitting body's own wording ("admitted to the bar", "called to the bar") and with a registration number where the body issues one. The public register that body keeps is the record the page has to agree with.
• Courts, meaning the ones the firm's attorneys appear in now, each by the name the court uses for itself. A court on the list is a statement about the present.
• Practice areas, by the names a client uses for the matter: "child support changes", "unpaid overtime", "a will and a power of attorney", rather than a heading from the firm's own filing system.
• Languages, with who speaks each one and whether a consultation can be held in it. "Multilingual team" tells a caller nothing they can act on.
• Office hours, as the hours the phone is answered and the days consultations happen. If the office receives clients only by appointment, Google's Business Profile guidelines say such a business should not list hours on its profile; the site can still say how an appointment is made.
• Consultation terms: free or charged, how long, and in what format, whether in person, by phone or by video.
• Fee basis for each matter: hourly, flat fee, contingency or a retainer, and what the fee covers. Whether to state an amount as well is one of the questions further down.

Each fact has to read the same everywhere the firm writes it: the attorney's page, the practice pages, the footer, the markup, the Business Profile and any directory profile the firm controls, so that a reader, whether a person or a program, finds one entity described the same way in each. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026), 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages. The figure covers the whole sample, with no law firm cut. A firm with several offices and a changing roster has more places to disagree with itself.

The structured data repeats the page and adds nothing to it; Google's introduction to structured data asks that only what a visitor can see be marked up. For the firm, the type is LegalService, one of the LocalBusiness types on schema.org. schema.org's own page for the narrower Attorney type marks it deprecated in favor of LegalService, so a firm that uses Attorney today has a reason to change it.

Each attorney is a Person, and an admission can sit on that node as hasCredential: an EducationalOccupationalCredential, schema.org's type for an occupational credential, that names the admitting body in recognizedBy and the jurisdiction in validIn. schema.org places the credential types in its "new" area, which it describes as open to change from implementation feedback. The year of admission stays in the visible text, where a reader sees it.

When a plain fact still raises a question

Some facts may carry a rule with them, depending on where the firm's lawyers are admitted, and this page cannot say which rule or what it requires. These are the places where the fact sheet and the rules meet, each worth asking about before it is published:

• A court the firm appeared in once is a fact about the past. Listing it among the courts the firm appears in turns it into a statement about the present, and whether the list reads as a claim of experience is worth asking.
• An office is a fact where clients are received and someone works. Whether a shared or virtual address may be presented as an office is a question for the bar, and Google's Business Profile guidelines set their own test for an office in a co-working space: clear signage, customers received there and staff present during business hours.
• A count is a fact, and a count of cases taken or clients served can read as a statement about results. It belongs with the past-results question in the next section.
• A client's name, or a matter the firm handled, is a fact about the firm's past, and publishing it raises a confidentiality question before a marketing one.

None of this makes the facts less useful. It means the fact sheet goes through the same questions as every other statement before it is published, and the firm's review routine is where that happens.

Six kinds of statement to put to the bar before publishing

These are the kinds of statement to take to the bar, the law society or the firm's ethics counsel before they appear on a page, a profile or a post. Each is written as a question, because the answer depends on where the firm's lawyers are admitted and this page does not supply it.

Ask once for each jurisdiction where the firm's lawyers are admitted. A site is read wherever its readers are, and whether more than one set of rules applies to it is itself a question for counsel. Write each answer down with the date, the person who gave it and the wording it cleared.

Until an answer comes back, the statement can stay off the page. Nothing on the fact sheet depends on it, and an answer that names the firm still has the admissions, the courts, the practice areas and the terms to repeat.